"Native American Flesh Color" Topic

Ok, I'm sure some of you will get a laugh out of this but hey, I'm serious….I want to know what color of flesh Native Americans of the Woodlands variety have. ;-)

I'm Belgian so I have never seen a Woodland Indian in person. I could of course watch "The last of the Mohicans" but I'm sure that those Indians are covered with make-up and under bright lights so therefore "not of the right color". ;-) The pictures of painted Woodland indians miniatures that I find on the WWW appear either too dark or too light to me.

So help me out my American friends. Are Native Americans light brown like Asians or are they really "redskins"? How would YOU paint your indians? I know, I know, with a brush of course but I mean in what color. ;-)

I use Foundry paint so it REALLY would help me out a lot if someone could give me the right Foundry paint codes to use.

Thanks

Have you tried the following Foundry webpage?

link

Cheers
Kevin

Thanks Kevin, but there's no mention of skin color on that page so it's not what I need.

Thanks anyway.

I posted a link to just such a page on my miniaturewargaming.com site a couple of months ago. You can find a direct link here:

link

Personally, for Eastern woodlands Indians I paint the skin areas with a light brown, then paint the musculature with a little of the same light brown mixed with flesh tone (Dwarf skin or Flesh in GW or Vallejo)… and the light brown should be darker than the Dwarf Flesh… some very small hilights of the Dwarf Flesh… they appear to be tanned, a bit darker than the Europeans, but not red not brown and not yellow.

I use different browns as the base on different models, gives my Indians a slightly different look from one another, even before war paint and articles.

I tried painting some originally the same way I did my Plains Indians, but they were too dark, too red. The Woodlands Indians certainly lived outdoors so should not be "pale", but they also were not burned by a scorching plains sun either.

The CoolMiniOrNot article on ethnic skin colours has a couple of pictures of native americans:
link

If you get a couple of pictures of native americans you like, you could easily "extract" the skin colours with a colour picker in whatever image editing program you favour, and make colour swatches just like in the article.

Howard Hues makes a flesh tone called "Native American", which is what I use.

Most of the first nations folks I have met (mostly mig'maw) are well withing the european range of skin tones — not the pale white nordic sort of thing, but no more dark than my rather mixed euopean-origin self.

My favourite First Nations person (Canadian term for Native American), who happens to be my wife, would have skin colour about the same as a southern European person (Spanish or Italian), although probably a bit lighter than the First Nations people during the Seven Years War, due to some mixing of French and Scots-Irish in her ancestry. I think that Tecumseh and his lads were probably a little darker skinned. When I paint my Hurons, I use undercoat with red-brown then use GW bronze flesh with a hint of beastial brown and a pinch of red

You also have to figure that they spent a great deal more time living outside than their descendants do now, and that would result in darker skins.

I paint Indians with an undercoat of red brown. Then I use anything that might be in the "ruddy flesh" or "suntan" as the main skin tone. Leave some of the red brown showing through around the knees and elbows,etc. Usually any line of paints has something called ruddy flesh or something similar. go with those colors.Then highlight with a regular flesh color. Also check out the Conquest Miniatures web page for ideas.

I'm fairly light as Native Americans go. My brother got all the "bronze" skin color, I must be a throwback to the white guy a few generations back.

I'd say the family (other than me) is sort of darkly tanned with just a hint of red. I'd go with a slightly darker skin tone, on the order of southern Europeans, then give a light sunburn, and that would be about right. I've painted only a couple of Native American figs, I went with a double coat of GW Flesh Wash compared to the usual figure over a darker skin tone and only lightly drybrushing on a lighter color, and that looked good to me. Matched my father, anyhow, who spends a lot of time outside.

Thank you for this excellent information gentlemen! I think I will get my Native Americans right from now on. ;-)

Native Americans range in skin tone from virtually indistinguishable from whites to to an almost mahogany deep dark red-brown.
Your northeastern woodland guys should probably be almost white with just a hint of tan/red in the shading/highlighting department.
You could, of course, fudge the issue with liberal use of warpaint….:)

Think Mediterrainean, but with a slight red or orange ochre tint instead of olive. Lots of variation.

Keep in mind that most modern Indians have European genes in the mix these days (and vice versa in certain parts of the States), so they may not accurately portray what Huron skin tones were in the 1600s.

Don't forget the outdoors lifestyle — I've never considered my office-worker-sickly-white a good match for any campaiging soldier's complexion.

I would love to find out what combination Kevin used here:
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For a more recent discussion on this topic:
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I really like the suggestions here:

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TMP link
TMP link

Anyway, I have yet to decide what paints to use for my Hurons:

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TMP link

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